Last week’s video clip with Story Prize director Larry Dark apparently touched a nerve with one or more frustrated writers—it’s hard to tell just how many because all the bitter, bitter emails came through the anonymous tipline. Anyway, all the messages ran roughly the same, culminating in this assertion:
“Maybe artistically, it’s still ok, but commerically the short story is DEAD. That’s D-E-A-D. Who ever heard of a short story writer as a valid career? Sorry, not in THIS time period.”
Quick, somebody tell Alice Munro she doesn’t have a valid career. She’s up in Canada; you can swing by George Saunders‘s house on the way and break the news to him as well. I’ll stay here in New York and let Amy Hempel and Deborah Eisenberg know it’s time for them to move on.
I can see the whiny, no-doubt-anonymous objection now: “Yeah, but if those last four weren’t creative writing professors…” But if we started saying you couldn’t be “successful” as a writer unless all you did to make money was write—well, let’s just say the ranks of successful writers would be a lot less interesting.
(UPDATE: Yep, that very complaint came in barely 75 minutes after this post went live, adding, “If you do not have an MFA and therefore pander to academia, you are an OUTSIDER. Just FYI.” Note to anonymous outsiders: Perhaps the reason your stories aren’t getting published isn’t that the literary world is artistically bankrupt. Just FYI.)